Essential Berry

Thomas Berry (1914-2009), ecological & cosmological teacher & writer, cultural historian, & influential environmental thinker. Tweets by @DrewDellinger, PhD.

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

Cosmologist, teacher, and Berry-collaborator, Brian Swimme, with @SHSoakland and @drewdellinger, at the @CIIS_SF launch event for Swimme's new book, Cosmogenesis.

[Dr. Drew Dellinger @drewdellinger]

My teacher, Thomas Berry @EssentialBerry, wrote an absurd number of forewords, and I just added a new one to my collection!

[Dr. Drew Dellinger @drewdellinger]

"Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression."

—bell hooks (1984)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"The sacred can't be for just a few people, it has to be for everybody."

--Thomas Berry (interview w/ @drewdellinger, Nov. 4, 2002)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"To become serious is no good. Serious people are terrible.

To be non-trivial does not mean to be serious.

The fulfillment of life lies between the trivial and the serious."

—Thomas Berry in Assisi (1992)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"A person can *feel* isolated, but you can never *be* isolated."

—Thomas Berry in Assisi (1992)

3/3

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"When we say 'tree' we are actually talking about a relationship of soil, air, sun, and moisture.

To designate a tree alone is impossible, an abstraction."

1/3

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"So, too, with the human. We have no existence apart from the total Earth community that births us, sustains us, and participates in every facet of our lives."

2/3

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"In our science the part is primary, the whole is derivative. Science is frustrated by wholes."

--Thomas Berry, critiquing modern, Western science; (Assisi 1992)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"The universe is the way in which the divine embraces itself."

—Thomas Berry, Assisi, Italy (1992)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

“Our cosmology becomes our ethics.”

—@RevDrMatthewFox, “Some Thoughts on Thomas Berry’s Contributions to the Western Spiritual Tradition.”

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

��‘Ecology’ needs a more exciting name.”

—Thomas Berry in Assisi (1991)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"Now we can't afford to be simply well-intentioned; we have to be right. We have to know what we're after, which is a viable Planet Earth. We have to know what is viable."

--Thomas Berry (1991)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

Thomas Berry on "progress" (1991):

"We must always ask, 'in relation to what?' Progress, development, in relation to what? And at what cost?"

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

"Our scientists have just been plain stupid. The petroleum is there [in the ground] for a very good reason—to store the carbon so as to maintain the chemical balance of the atmosphere, to keep the life systems viable."

--Thomas Berry (1991)

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

“As soon as you say, ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’ you’re lost, because you’re into the patriarchal, transcendent deity.”

—Thomas Berry in Assisi

[Essential Berry @EssentialBerry]

“There is no such thing as a purely material event. Anything that has structure, intelligibility, is participating in ‘mind.’”

—Thomas Berry in Assisi